Category: BEST POSTS

The Party is Over

Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses (Juvenal, c100 CE: Satire 10.77-81)

A public that pays more attention to reality TV than its status as free citizens cannot withstand an unremitting encroachment on its liberties by calculating, unscrupulous and power-hungry leaders (Mike Lofgren, The Party is Over, 2012 CE)

The party is over

I haven’t even finished reading this book yet, and I may well have more to say about it later.  It is packed with sharp, pithily expressed and extremely scary observations about the break-down of the American political system and its corruption by corporate money.  A Republican who worked as a staffer in Congress for nearly 30 years, Lofgren is pretty scathing about the Democrats, but his most bitter attacks (at least so far) are directed against his own party which he describes as becoming less and less like a political party and more like ‘an apocalyptic cult’.

What he really exposes is a kind of doublespeak in which strident claims to be defending something – the constitution, liberty, democracy, the national interest- are used to conceal attacks on that same object.  ‘Let us now dispose,’ Lofgren writes, for instance, ‘ of the quaint notion that the present-day Republican Party is conservative.’   He defines the GOP, as it now exists, as a ‘radical right-wing party’, which doesn’t really conserve and protect anything, for all that it invokes the memory of a romanticised past, but seeks to completely transform society in the interests of the very wealthy* using whatever means possible and with a kind of Leninist ruthlessness.

The American political system works in a very different way from the British one, but there is much here that is familiar to a British reader all the same.  For instance:

The GOP reflexively scorns so-called elites (by which it means educated, critical thinkers) to mask the way it is utterly beholden to the true American elite.

I am particularly struck by Lofgren’s observation that the current Republican Party deliberately seeks to undermine the credibility of government itself:

Should Republicans succeed in preventing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress’s favorability rating among the American people. In such a scenario the party that presents itself as programmatically against government – i.e., the Republican Party – will come out the relative winner.

Undermining Americans’ belief in their own institutions of self-government remains a prime GOP electoral strategy.

A UK parallel is the relentless attack on the quality of public services, which is always ostensibly in the name of making them better, but which in fact reduces the standing of the services themselves.   But we also have a culture of cynicism about politicians and government in general, and I’ve long thought that (for instance) leftish comedians should be more aware of whose interests such routine and unfocused cynicism actually serves.

*Interesting fact: according to Lofgren under Eisenhower’s Republican presidency in the 50s, the top rate of income tax in the US was 91%.  Even the new leadership of the British Labour Party, characterised by many as unelectably left-wing, only proposes a top rate of 50%.

The violent faith

The grail legend has always had certain hold on my imagination since I encountered it as a child, and I’ve often thought about using it in some way in a story.  Partly for that reason, and partly because I’m perennially fascinated by the way that stories evolve over time, I recently read a translation of the original grail romance by Chretien de Troyes and then an interesting book* by Richard Barber which looks at how the story has changed over the centuries.   It was a bit of an eye-opener.

One point that Barber makes is that the original grail stories were written for a particular audience. These tales of knightly valour were written for real-life knights and, like so many books still do, served the purpose, among others, of flattering their readers.  For instance, looking at the original de Troyes story, and at the extracts of other medieval versions cited by Barber, I was struck by the amount of bling involved. You are constantly being told about the beautiful and costly possessions of the knights and ladies in the story, and being reminded that such things are their due as members of the gentry.

More chillingly, in one early thirteenth century version of the story (The High Book of the Grail), we are reminded of the business of those real life knights:

…the Good Knight went out to scour the land where the New Law [i.e. Christianity] was being neglected. He killed all those who would not believe in it, and the country of was ruled and protected by him, and the Law of Our Lord exalted by his strength and valour. (Barber, p 51)

The High Book was dedicated to Jean de Nesle, a leading figure both in the brutal Fourth Crusade against Constantinople, and in the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars that followed . I happen to have also read a book** recently about the latter.  Ordered by Pope Innocent III, it involved (among other things) the massacre in 1209 of the entire 20,000 population of the town of Beziers.

* * *

All this came back to me when, reading the commentary around David Bowie’s death, I was reminded that there had been some controversy about Bowie’s ‘blasphemous’ use of Christian imagery in his video for ‘The Next Day’.  And I was particularly struck by a comment of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey:  ‘I doubt that Bowie would have the courage to use Islamic imagery. I very much doubt it’.

What a strange and revealing remark.  People like Bowie wouldn’t mock Christianity, he is really saying, if they thought they might be killed for it.  And Carey should know!  His own Anglican church is the largest denomination in the English-speaking world, after all, not as the result of kindly Episcopalians gently persuading Catholics and others of the error of their ways, but through the use of violence and terror.  Read Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell novels for a description of a process which included, among other things, monks who refused to swear allegiance to Henry VIII as head of the English church being publicly castrated and disembowelled.

* * *

Yes, and in the same way, the reason that there are no Cathars today in the South of France is not that the Roman Catholic church engaged in rational argument with that version of the Christian faith, treating its beliefs with respect, and showing the kind of sensitivity to the feelings of its adherents that Bowie was told off for failing to exercise. No. Cathars were hunted down, tortured to make them inform on one another, and burnt alive until their entire faith was completely exterminated.  In one case, the Catholic authorities learned that an elderly woman had asked for the Cathar equivalent of the Last Rites. She was taken from her death bed and thrown onto a fire.

The versions of Christianity that we know today are actually only a small subset of the ones that have existed in the past, and the Cathars are only one example of the alternatives that were annihilated by the violence of their more ruthless or more powerful rivals. It’s interesting to consider what kind of effect this Darwinian process has had on the content of Christian belief itself.  For a religion, too, is a story written for the benefit of an audience, and this religion, in the form we know it —the form that now asks for its feelings to be respected—was written for generations by or for those who regarded killing and torture as legimate ways of treating those who disagreed with them.  Lord Carey’s strange comment suggests to me that he and his church have a long way to go before they fully recognise the implications of that.  It reminded me of a husband telling his wife she ought to be more grateful that he doesn’t beat her any more.

*Richard Barber, The Holy Grail: the history of a legend.  Penguin.
**Stephen O’Shea, The Perfect Heresy: the life and death of the Cathars.  Profile Books.

His own peculiar complex illness…

The BBC’s current serialised adaption of War and Peace made me look back at my copy of the book.   I’d quite forgotten that, when reading it some years ago, I’d made a note of a number of authorial reflections and asides which particularly struck me, the very things that are inevitably lost when a work as massive as this is transferred to the screen.  Here was one (I hope it’s not too much of a spoiler to reveal that Natasha gets ill!):

Doctors visited Natasha both singly and in consultation, spoke a good deal of French, German, and Latin, denounced one another, prescribed the most varied medications for all the illnesses known to them: but the simple thought never occurred to any of them that they could not know the illness Natasha was suffering from… for each human being has his peculiarities, and also his his own peculiar complex illness, unknown to medical science, not an illness of the lungs, the liver, the skin, the heart, the nerves and so on… but an illness consisting in one of the countless combinations of afflictions of these organs*.

A constantly recurring theme in the book -it’s particularly evident in the discussion of the war, which repeatedly contrasts what actually happened, with how this rationalised after the event- is the chaotic nature of life, the way that at any given moment of time we are faced with a unique and incredibly complex set of circumstances which we can’t possibly fully understand, and which will have changed in any case in the next moment, and the next and the next.  Doctors, generals, military historians, intellectuals, are all at various points depicted as persuading themselves that they can understand and master what is in fact unmasterable.

In historical events what is most obvious is the prohibition against eating the tree of knowledge.  Only unconscious activity bears fruit, and a man who plays a role in a historical event never understands its significance.  If he attempts to understand it, he is struck with fruitlessness.

In their own way, those doctors were useful, though not at all in the  sense that they imagined:

They were useful not because they made the patient swallow what were for the most part harmful substances . . ., but they were useful, necessary, inevitable, because they satisfied the moral need of the sick girl and the people who loved her. They satisfied that eternal human need for the hope of relief, the need for compassion and action, which a human being experiences in a time of suffering.

I think a lot of this stuff struck me at the time -in fact, I believe this was why I made those notes- because of its relevance to my former profession of social work, which, just like Tolstoy’s doctors, attempts interventions again and again in complex, unique and ever changing situations which can’t really be truly understood, in order to satisfy the “moral need” of society to feel it is doing something about the troubling people on its fringes.

In War and Peace, the arrogance of Napoleon, who does not understand the limitations of his knowledge or power, and imagines himself as so godlike as to be able to impose his own will on events, is contrasted with the wisdom of General  Kutuzov, with his minimalist approach that was always ready to retreat or give ground and let events take their course, even when others were insisting that “something must be done”, if this seemed likely to result in those events unfolding in roughly the right direction on their own.   The best social workers understand this, but like politicians, and like general Kutuzov, they are constantly up against the false logic of the “Politician’s syllogism”**:

  1. We must do something
  2. This is something
  3. Therefore, we must do this.
*Translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, published by Vintage Books, 2007
**First spelled out like this in the satirical TV programme, Yes, Minister.

I, clawfoot

Here is a guest post I did for Sarah Chorn, who edits a column on SF signal called Special Needs in Strange Worlds.   I am very grateful to Sarah for giving me an opportunity to discuss the people with disabilities who appear in Dark Eden and Mother of Eden (the batfaces, clawfeet and slowheads), as I don’t think anyone has specifically asked me about them before and they are absolutely central to the world of Eden.

In this post, I also reveal that I am in a way the original for the so-called clawfeet.  Which, now I think about it, may partly explain my decision to make the clawfooted Jeff Redlantern very wise and absolutely irresistible to women.

Originality and origins

I was fairly irritated by this comment, alleging that I had “plagiarised” Dark Eden from an out-0f-print hundred-year-old Polish science fiction novel, never published in English, and which I’ve never heard of.   If we’re going to bandy about unpleasant words like plagiarism, the word slander comes to mind!

A while back, someone sent me a slightly hostile tweet alleging that I’d lifted one of the main ideas in The Holy Machine, a female robot messiah, from the Fritz Lang film Metropolis.   Now in this case I have seen the film, back in the 1980s when it came out with a new rock soundtrack.  The only scenes I can now remember were the huge factory, and the city with its vast multi-level streams of traffic, but it’s entirely possible all the same that the idea of a robot messiah lodged somewhere in my brain and was one of the sources of Holy Machine.

But why the hostility?  It seems to be based on a somewhat off-beam notion of how writers operate and what constitutes originality.  We do not operate in a vacuum.  As we cast about for ideas we draw on what is already in our brains.  What alternative do we have?   And what is in our brains includes countless images and ideas we have read about, or seen in movies, or been told about by friends.  There is a scene in Dark Eden, for instance, where John Redlantern puts his hand on a long-lost ring.  Would I have come up with this, if I hadn’t read The Hobbit?   I very much doubt it.

But its more complicated than just Writer A has an idea, Writer B steals/borrows/uses it.  A conscious influence on Holy Machine, as I’ve acknowledged before, was the movie the Stepford Wives (based on the novel by Ira Levin) which I saw in the seventies, in which a bunch of men preferred subservient robot simulacra to real women.  That undoubtedly influenced the beginning of the Holy Machine, where the isolated and socially phobic George Simling chooses a robot sex toy, rather than take the (to him terrifying) risk of actually relating to another human being.   But the Stepford wives is itself part of a tradition of stories going back to the Greek legend of Pygmalion (just as Tolkein’s accursed ring is an idea that goes back to the Norse story of Andvari’s ring), and this story surely persists because, in its essentials, it really happens, over and over again, in the real world: men trying to shape women into their image of women should be.   In her book about her abduction and long captivity, for instance, Natascha Kampusch refers to the Pygmalion legend as a way of explaining what her captor was trying to do to her, but hers was just an extreme example of something that occurs all the time.

Sometimes ideas recur, in other words, not because one writer borrows from another, but because both writers are attempting to represent the same aspect of reality, much as certain shapes and structures recur independently in nature as a result of parallel evolution.   Often it is impossible to know whether this is what has happened, or whether there has been a more direct influence.   I genuinely don’t know, for instance, whether or not Metropolis had any direct influence on The Holy Machine.

*   *   *

When writing about Dark Eden, I’ve acknowledged several influences that I’m conscious of: in particular Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Hoban’s Riddley Walker, and Aldiss’ Helliconia series, as well as a couple of things from Tolkein, and the green-on-black screen of an old Amstrad computer.  When it comes to Mother of Eden, I’m less sure, but here are a few.

There is a scene during Starlight’s second crossing of Worldpool, which I am fairly sure was inspired by a moment in Jane Campion’s beautiful film, The Piano.

Certainly 3,096 Days by Natascha Kampusch (already mentioned) was an influence.  Starlight is never a captive in quite the literal sense that Kampusch was, but she finds herself a captive nevertheless.  I was really extraordinarily moved by Kampusch’s indomitable spirit, and I think this influenced my thinking about Starlight’s character, her determination to resist.

I’ve been very into Shakespeare’s history plays over the last couple of years, and have also read several books about Tudor and medieval history (these include Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell books, though in their case, I read them after completing the book, encouraged by the recent TV series).  I know my exposure to these various sources influenced my thinking about power, dealing as they did with a period when to fall from power, or to challenge power unsuccessfully, was typically to invite your own death.   (This is still the case, of course, in many countries today.  North Korea and our great ally, Saudi Arabia, spring to mind.)

Tolkein was an influence too, and this time a conscious one, but in a funny inverted kind of way.  Dark Eden had brought a powerful ring – Gela’s ring – into the picture, and in Mother of Eden that ring is much more prominent (Gela’s Ring was my original title for the book).  But I’m not writing fantasy.   There are two hostile camps in Mother of Eden, but neither is wholly good or wholly evil, and my ring has no inherent power, hard though this is to hold onto when you are actually in its presence:

But what was it? [Starlight asks herself at one point] What was I looking at? Didn’t you have to know what a thing was before you could really see it?…. I knew lots of stories about it like everyone did – it had been made on Earth, it had been found by John Redlantern, it had been snatched by Firehand from out of that pot of boiling water – but they were just stories, stories that had been wrapped round it, not the ring itself. So now I tried and tried, until my head ached, to push them from my mind and look at the ring itself.

It was just a thing. I could see that. Just a small small thing. When it was first made on Earth, no one could have known where it would go or what it would come to mean. But it was impossible to hold onto that, impossible to hold away the stories that had made this little object seem so big. In fact, so big had it become that it kept pulling more stories around itself, and growing bigger still…

Hierarchies in Eden

In the article I discussed in my previous post, David Brin argued that a rigidly hierarchical pyramidal social structure was an “attractor” in the mathematical sense of the word: a pattern or shape towards which a dynamic system tends to evolve.

I’ve often seen Dark Eden described as a ‘dystopian’ novel but, though life may seem grim in Eden, the society itself, as described at the beginning of the book, is actually in many ways utopian.  It has not settled into one of those rigid hierarchical pyramids.  There are no distinctions between rich and poor; women are at least as powerful as men; murder and rape are unknown.

In the second Eden novel (Mother of Eden) all this has changed.  Most of Eden has succumbed to the pyramidal attractor, and the majority of its population live in one of two highly stratified societies, one founded by John Redlantern, the other ruled by the descendants of David Redlantern.   In the case of the ‘Johnfolk’ at least, the people at the bottom of the pyramid are really no more than serfs, ruled over in a more-or-less feudal way, by ‘chiefs’ who are the heirs of those who were John’s lieutenants in his protracted struggle against the Davidfolk. The great rift in Eden’s human community that was depicted in the first book, was the catalyst which set in motion the process of stratification which  also included the increasing dominance of men over women.

One of the things I was interested in exploring in Mother of Eden is how those hierarchies work.   My main protagonist, Starlight Brooking, comes from one of the few remaining exceptions to the pyramidal norm, and she finds it bewildering that such a very number of people can exercise so much control over so many.  Why don’t the people at the bottom of the pyramid simply refuse to do what they’re told?

She discovers there are many reasons, one of which is the fact that the system of stories and beliefs which people use as their source of meaning has, to to speak, been rigged so that it bolsters the status quo.   Another is a ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ kind of paradox: yes, if all the ‘small’ people rose up together, they could defeat the ‘big’ people, but if some stand up to the big people and the others don’t take their side, they’ll end up a lot worse off than they would have been if they kept their heads down.   Another again is that even people who seem low down in the pyramid, and look like they are getting a pretty bad deal, do in fact turn out to have at least some stake in in maintaining the structure as it is, if they know they’re not right at the bottom.

I won’t say how it all works out for Starlight, but I will say that I think people sometimes forget that last point when they are thinking about politics in the modern world.  It simply isn’t the case that the world can be divided up in ‘the rich and powerful’ and ‘the rest of us’, however much we’d like to place ourselves squarely on the side of the good guys.  In a country like the UK, even middle-income people who don’t think of themselves as especially well off are, by global standards, not only very rich, but quite possibly richer (at least in purely material terms) than will ever be possible for the human race as a whole.

An unsung Einstein

This article by Sophie Heawood struck a chord with me. She’s writing about her daughter, who she “hoped and prayed… wouldn’t want to start down the road of passive pink princess crap, not when she could be out climbing trees and building dams and doing stimulating things with her life”, but who insisted on wearing a pink tutu and ballet shoes for her third birthday.

“I’m not saying the fight in me has completely gone,” she says. “But I am starting to wonder why mums like me write this stuff off so vigorously: isn’t it more sexist to regard things that are girly as not being good enough?”

I had a similar thought at the recent World Science Fiction Convention, listening to a woman panellist extolling an author (I forget which) for her strong, powerful ‘bad-ass’ female characters. I’m absolutely in favour of having powerful female characters behaving in ways that are stereotypically masculine, but it struck me at the time that we should be careful not to fall into the trap of thinking that stereotypically feminine characters, whether female or male, are somehow inferior. That, as Heawood implies, is just sexism in another form, and do we really want to give out the message anyway that soldiers, say, are better and more interesting than nurses? Challenging sexism shouldn’t be about denigrating the stereotypically feminine and extolling the stereotypically masculine. It should be about validating both and making sure that people of either gender are able to play whichever role suits them.

As a not particularly ‘bad-ass’ man, I’m proud to have worked most of my adult life in social work, a stereotypically feminine profession (like nursing), which is overwhelmingly female. Last time I checked, the social work workforce in the UK was something like 85% women, and this is certainly true of the social work students I now teach. Do I think that these women are wasting their talents by not training to be engineers or bankers? Certainly not. Am I bothered that both genders aren’t equally represented? Not particularly. (Who knows whether our dispositions and preferences are entirely socially determined, or whether there’s a biological component, but either way, it’s important that people are able to do the kind of work they are drawn to, not what others think they ought to do.) What does bother me though is that difficult, demanding and manifestly important activities like looking after people in hospitals, teaching in primary schools, or protecting children from abuse, should be regarded as less important and less prestigious, than stereotypically masculine activities like building dams, or playing with money.

Some years ago – I was involved at the time with a fostercare agency – I attended a Christmas dinner that the agency laid on as a thankyou for its carers. The woman sitting next to me was a working class single parent. She was not particularly well-educated, and certainly not in any way famous, but I found myself telling her that I felt a bit like I was sitting next to a kind of Einstein. This woman took in children who had been through absolutely horrendous experiences: children who’d been serially raped before they even started school by the adults on whom they were entirely dependent for care, children who couldn’t get through a night without screaming because of the flashbacks, children who trusted no one and wouldn’t let anyone near them. She took them in, took all their rage and rejection, their violence and chaos, and somehow hung in there, calmly and steadily, for months and years, until even they began to feel they’d arrived somewhere safe. Very few people have this kind of talent. Most people, and certainly me, would very quickly buckle in that blast of misery and terror.

In a more rational world, a woman like her really would be esteemed as highly as famous scientists and great leaders. I guess that will never happen, not least because part of her talent lay in knowing that her own ego wasn’t the most important thing.  But don’t tell me that some action hero is a better role model than her.

The bones of St Josaphat

A while ago I wrote a post here about the story of St Josaphat, a story which itself had had adventures and travelled through many lands.  It began as a story about Buddha, but had crossed into Persia, then the Arab world, then Georgia, then the Greek world, and finally into the Latin world, with Buddha’s Sanskrit name (Bodhisattva) gradually changing as the story passed from language to language, and the religious background also changing from Buddhism to Islam to Christianity, so that Buddha becomes the Christian saint, Josaphat.

I came across a coda to that story in a book review* I read recently in the LRB:

In 1571, the doge of Venice presented a sacred relic to King Sebastian of Portugal: a bone from Josaphat’s spine.  It is still in a silver reliquary in the St Andrieskerk in Antwerp.

So a real flesh and blood human being becomes the subject of a legend.  The legend travels half-way round the planet, and there it is made real yet again.  I find that delightful for some reason.

* The review by Eliot Weinberger was of  In Search of the Christian Buddha: How an Asian Sage became a Medieval Saint, by Donald S. Lopez Jr and Peggy McCracken.

Canonical

Another panel I’ll be taking part in at Loncon is called ‘The Canon Is Dead.  What Now?’ (Saturday, 16th Aug,  19:00 – 20:00, Capital Suite 16 (ExCeL))  The other panellists for this one are  Kate Nepveu, Connie Willis, Alvaro Zinos-Amaro and Joe Monti.  This is the blurb we’ve been given:

On the one hand, initiatives like the SF Gateway are helping to ensure the SF backlist remains accessible to today’s readers, and an increasing number of “classic” SF writers are receiving the establishment seal of approval in series like the Library of America (Philip K. Dick) and the Everyman Library (Isaac Asimov). On the other hand, the SF readership is increasingly diverse, with fewer readers who have come to the field via those “classics”, and many who find little of value in them in any case. In other words the traditional SF canon is no longer tenable — but the history is still out there. So what alternative models and narratives should we be using to understand the field’s past? Should we be working to expand the canon, or to describe multiple overlapping histories — or something else?

And here are a few initial thoughts of mine:

If I was asked to justify the existence of English Literature as a publicly funded academic activity, one of my first answers would be that it creates a canon.   That is, it generates for the rest of us a sort of longlist of books from the past which are worth our attention. To be sure, any such list (just like the longlists and shortlists of contemporary literary prizes) will be contentious and subjective – so-and-so has been overlooked; so-and-so is overrated; there are too many dead white men, etc etc – but that’s another useful function of Englit professionals.  They revisit the canon, they develop and revise it.  The fact that it can’t be set in stone forever is not a reason for dismissing it as of no use.

The same is true of history.   Our understanding of the past is constantly being revised, but that doesn’t mean that historians are of no use.  Few of us have the time, skills or inclination to go back to the original documents on which history is based, and no one could do so for anything other than a small part of the past.   Without historians going back to original sources, the only history we would have left would be mythology and propaganda.

And, in the same way few people will wade, without any guidance, through the entire body of SF to find the stuff that is worth reading (though in this case, fandom plays a key role which may be more influential than professional scholarship.)  We like to think we live in an information age in which everything is only a google search away, but useful information doesn’t spring spontaneously into being without human mediation, and without layers and layers of evaluation (evaluation of books, evaluation of evaluators, evaluation of the criteria by which evaluation of books takes place).  Leaving aside SF from the past, how does any of us figure out what to read now?   We rely on reviews of one kind or another, shortlists and prizes, word of mouth, controversies, recommendations, all of which are really just the beginnings of the centuries-long process that leads ultimately to some works becoming ‘canonical’ at certain points, while others lapse into obscurity.

So I’m not sure the phrase ‘the canon is dead’ makes much sense, in relation to SF, or in relation to any other field.  It seems to me ‘the canon’ would only be dead in a world where each individual read everything, and come to his or her own judgement without consulting anyone else.   What is true is that the canon is not a fixed thing, but something that grows, changes, and exists in multiple competing forms.  But all of these, surely, are characteristics of entities that are alive!

Dickian

I’m taking part in several panels at the World SF Convention in London this August (details here).

Below are some preliminary thoughts for the panel on Philip K. Dick. (Through a Hollywood Adaptation, Darkly: Thursday, August 14th, 18:00 -19:00). The other panellists will be Christi Scarborough, Grania Davis and Malcolm Edwards, and the blurb for the panel is as follows:

Thanks largely to the ever-increasing number of film adaptations of his work, Philip K Dick is one of the small number of genre authors whose names have been commoditised: “Dickian” is now a shorthand for paranoia, shifting realities and unstable identities, or even for the condition of twenty-first century life in general. But to what extent is this cliché precis an accurate reflection of the breadth of Dick’s work? What other themes and preoccupations can we see in his novels and stories? How far does his influence on modern SF really extend — and what rewards does his work offer to new readers today?

No one could deny that paranoia, shifting realities and unstable identities are major themes in Dick’s work, and Dick is indeed sometimes hailed as a kind of uniquely prophetic voice on ‘the condition of twenty-first century life’, a post-modernist ahead of his time. But yes, this is a cliché precis. Not only is there a lot more to Philip Dick than it suggests, but, even as a summary, it is somewhat misleading.

First of all, while Dick’s shifting realities may seem post-modern, Dick wasn’t really a post-modernist at all. Post-modernists emphasise plurality and flux: there isn’t one reality, but many different realities. Dick’s work may superficially seem to conform to this view of the world, but in fact what he depicts again and again are people dealing, not with many different equally valid realities, but rather with falsehoods and illusions which seem real, but are actually fake. Dick’s characters are always searching for authenticity, for reality in the singular. They may never find it, they may fear that it can’t be found, but they never stop looking for it. This isn’t post-modern, it’s positively pre-modern, and the more so in Dick’s later works where he is increasingly drawn to Christian theology, albeit in a particularly dark, scary and Dickian form. (No one ever describes as Dickian the belief that the world is a battleground between the followers of Christ and the servants of darkness – it doesn’t chime so well with a vision of Dick as edgy, contemporary, prescient – but it’s very much part of the vision of his later work.)

Secondly, I think the conventional precis of Dick’s work overemphasises the extent to which his work can be read as a social commentary. I would argue on the one hand that his work operates much more at the psychological level (as opposed to the sociological one), and, on the other, that he is at least as preoccupied with things that he sees as timeless, as he is with the condition of society at a particular point in history. (One of the appeals of writing SF, it’s always seemed to me, is that it does allow one to step outside the parochial concerns of the present moment.)  Of course Dick’s work reflects the time it was written in – a time which was simultaneously one of great optimism and one of terrible darkness and violence – but the two deepest roots of his writing, it seems to me, extend outwards on either side of the ‘social’. On one side, many of his preoccupations are very personal ones: for instance the figure of the dead female twin, which appears again and again in his work (Valis, Flow my Tears, Dr Bloodmoney…) comes directly from Dick’s own biography: his own twin sister Jane died in infancy. On the other side it is metaphysical, concerned with the place of the human soul in the universe (which is where Dick’s quirky version of Christian theology comes in). His greatness lies in the way he linked up the personal with the universal.

Here are some recurring themes I’ve noticed in Dick’s work:

A sense of loss.

This, I imagine, had very personal origins for Dick. Parents grieving a dead child are not best placed to welcome a baby into the world, and I would guess his life felt very lonely indeed from the start. (Look at the dark, lonely and guilt-ridden childhood depicted in the brilliant short story ‘I Hope I shall Arrive Soon.’) Dick’s experience wasn’t unique though. A feeling of loss, of absence, of insufficiency, is part of the human condition. Hence the Biblical legend of the Fall.  Valis is a particularly terrifying vision of a fallen world, a world in the sway of darkness, but the same vision is to be found in Flow my Tears and Palmer Eldritch among many others. And the figure of the dead twin sister (elevated in Valis to a dead female demiurge), which so clearly comes from Dick’s own biography, is turned into a powerful metaphor for the feeling of loss and absence which we all know.

Even those famous ‘shifting realities’ are also in a way representations of loss. That’s what loss is like. We think something is real and then it is snatched away from us. Ragle Gumm in Time out of Joint (surely the prototype for the film The Truman Show?) imagines the world he’s in is real, but it turns out to be a crude set of stage props, Rick Deckard in Do Androids Dream finds what seems to be a real animal, and then finds the tell-tale battery compartment.

In the story ‘I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon’, we find another take on ‘shifting realities’ and their relationship to loss. The main character Victor Kemmings is starting out on a ten year journey to another planet, during which he is supposed to be in a state of cryogenic suspension. Something has gone wrong. He is still conscious and faces the prospect of spending the next ten years lying all alone in a kind of coffin. Realising that he will go completely mad, the intelligent spaceship tries to ease the situation by feeding him his own memories, but Kemmings’ past is so painful to him that this only makes things worse. Finally the ship hits on the idea of feeding him, over and over, the illusion of arrival. Again and again, Kemmings reaches his destination and disembarks, only for the illusion to unravel and the ship have to run it all over again. It keeps Kemmings sane for ten years, but at a cost. When he really does arrive, he still can’t believe it’s real.

If we have to retreat into illusion to keep ourselves sane, the story suggests, the price we will pay in the long run is that nothing will ever seem quite real. This is very much a psychological explanation for those famous paranoid scenarios – and one consistent with the work of object relations psychologists such as Bowlbly, Klein or Winnicott – as opposed to a sociological, political or cultural one.

The cherished possession

Another figure I have noticed many times in Dick’s work is what I call ‘the cherished possession’. This is some treasured object which has huge significance for the character. In Do Androids Dream, for instance, Deckard longs to possess a real animal. He keeps an electric sheep as an affordable substitute, but what his heart is set on is a real one, and he spends a lot of time hanging around outside pet shops and thumbing through his catalogue.  In High Castle, Mr Tagomi possesses a jewel which somehow exists of itself, and not simply as a human projection. In Flow my Tears both the powerful policeman Felix Buckman and his sister-lover Alys are assiduous collectors of objects of many kinds and Buckman secures his sister’s co-operation at one point by making a present to her of a particularly fine postage stamp for her to ‘put it away in your album in your safe forever’. In the short story, ‘I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon’ (about which I once wrote an MA dissertation: hence my particular emphasis!), the cherished object is a poster of ‘Fat Freddy’ from the Furry Freak Brothers comics called ‘Speed Kills’, signed by the artist Don Shelton. (Both the poster and the artist are real, incidentally. The poster in question is below.)

FatFreddyPostCardSpeedKills

These cherished possessions are, of course, subject to the same anxious doubts as other aspects of Dick’s world. Supposedly real animals may turn out to be electric ones, a supposedly authentic object may turn out to be a fake. In High Castle there is a debate about the authenticity of a cigarette lighter alleged to have belonged to Franklin Roosevelt. Yes, there are letters of authenticity, but how do we know that they themselves aren’t fake? Exactly the same debate takes place about the Gilbert Shelton poster in ‘I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon.’

Hope

One other thing that isn’t so often commented on in Dick’s work is that, however dark the scenario, however terrifying the forces against which they are pitted, the characters themselves are never completely devoid of good humour or hope. ‘I mean, after all,’ says the indefatigable Leo Bulero in Palmer Eldritch, ‘you have to consider we’re only made out of dust… But even considering, I mean it’s a sort of bad beginning, we’re not doing too bad. So I personally have faith that even in this lousy situation we’re faced with we can make it.’

In the poisoned Earth of Do Androids Dream millions of people subscribe to the stoical religion of Mercerism, using devices known as ‘empathy boxes’ to connect themselves to the vision of their prophet, Wilbur Mercer, as he struggles eternally up the slopes of a bare mountain in spite of rocks and stones that are constantly being cast at him. At a certain point in the novel a TV programme exposes this central scene of Mercerism to be a forgery, faked up in a film studio with an actor playing Mercer against a crude painted backdrop (close examination reveals the actual brush-strokes).  And yet somehow in spite of this the truth of Mercerism – its utility in enabling people to engage with one another and with their harsh existence – remains undimmed while those who exposed the artifice turn out to be artefacts themselves.  (They are androids, famously distinguishable from human beings by their inability to experience empathy).

In suggesting that it is the would-be debunkers, not the Mercerists, who are missing the point, Dick cuts through all the paranoid doubts about reality and authenticity which are such a constant theme of his work, and challenges his own definition of reality (in Valis) as ‘that which when you stop believing in it, it doesn’t go away’. If we are to have a shared reality with other people then this has to be able to include things that are sustained only by belief. After all empathy itself depends on our belief in something that can never actually be proven to be true: that other creatures have feelings which are in some way equivalent to our own.

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